THE HOUSELESS.
The minister kept Gibbie hard at work, and by the time Donal's last winter came, Gibbie was ready for college also.To please Mr.
Sclater he competed for a bursary, and gained a tolerably good one, but declined accepting it.His guardian was annoyed, he could not see why he should refuse what he had "earned." Gibbie asked him whether it was the design of the founder of those bursaries that rich boys should have them.Were they not for the like of Donal?
Whereupon Mr.Sclater could not help remembering what a difference it would have made to him in his early struggles, if some rich bursar above him had yielded a place--and held his peace.
Daur-street being too far from Elphinstone College for a student to live there, Mr.Sclater consented to Gibbie's lodging with Donal, but would have insisted on their taking rooms in some part of the town--more suitable to the young baronet's position, he said; but as there was another room to be had at Mistress Murkison's, Gibbie insisted that one who had shown them so much kindness must not be forsaken; and by this time he seldom found difficulty in having his way with his guardian.Both he and his wife had come to understand him better, and nobody could understand Gibbie better without also understanding better all that was good and true and right: although they hardly knew the fact themselves, the standard of both of them had been heightened by not a few degrees since Gibbie came to them;and although he soon ceased to take direct notice of what in their conduct distressed him, I cannot help thinking it was not amiss that he uttered himself as he did at the first; knowing a little his ways of thinking they came to feel his judgment unexpressed.For Mrs.
Sclater, when she bethought herself that she had said or done something he must count worldly, the very silence of the dumb boy was a reproof to her.
One night the youths had been out for a long walk and came back to the city late, after the shops were shut.Only here and there a light glimmered in some low-browed little place, probably used in part by the family.Not a soul was visible in the dingy region through which they now approached their lodging, when round a corner, moving like a shadow, came, soft-pacing, a ghostly woman in rags, with a white, worn face, and the largest black eyes, it seemed to the youths that they had ever seen--an apparition of awe and grief and wonder.To compare a great thing to a small, she was to their eyes as a ruined, desecrated shrine to the eyes of the saint's own peculiar worshipper.I may compare her to what I please, great or small--to a sapphire set in tin, to an angel with draggled feathers; for far beyond all comparison is that temple of the holy ghost in the desert--a woman in wretchedness and rags.She carried her puny baby rolled hard in the corner of her scrap of black shawl.
To the youths a sea of trouble looked out of those wild eyes.As she drew near them, she hesitated, half-stopped, and put out a hand from under the shawl--stretched out no arm, held out only a hand from the wrist, white against the night.Donal had no money.
Gibbie had a shilling.The hand closed upon it, a gleam crossed the sad face, and a murmur of thanks fluttered from the thin lips as she walked on her way.The youths breathed deep, and felt a little relieved, but only a little.The thought of the woman wandering in the dark and the fog and the night, was a sickness at their hearts.
Was it impossible to gather such under the wings of any night-brooding hen? That Gibbie had gone through so much of the same kind of thing himself, and had found it endurable enough, did not make her case a whit the less pitiful in his eyes, and indeed it was widely, sadly different from his.Along the deserted street, which looked to Donal like a waterless canal banked by mounds of death, and lighted by phosphorescent grave-damps, they followed her with their eyes, the one living thing, fading away from lamp to lamp; and when they could see her no farther, followed her with their feet; they could not bear to lose sight of her.But they kept just on the verge of vision, for they did not want her to know the espial of their love.Suddenly she disappeared, and keeping their eyes on the spot as well as they could, they found when they reached it a little shop, with a red curtain, half torn down, across the glass door of it.A dim oil lamp was burning within.It looked like a rag-shop, dirty and dreadful.There she stood, while a woman with a bloated face, looking to Donal like a feeder of hell-swine, took from some secret hole underneath, a bottle which seemed to Gibbie the very one his father used to drink from.He would have rushed in and dashed it from her hand, but Donal withheld him.
